(yalibnan.com): A new e-publishing law in Syria is now in its final stages for approval. The law has received considerable coverage since the drafting started in early 2010. The details of the law are yet to be cleared out, and coverage thus far has been contradictory. The law officially aims at creating a legal framework for news websites to operate within.

(brudirect.com): Libraries face challenges to maintain up-to-date resources and how to attract the reading public in the face of free and readily available content on the web, said the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). Addressing a gathering of regional university librarians, Dr Zohrah Hj Sulaiman stated that open access journal databases and e-books have become competitors to libraries but that these resources are in no way near a replacement to libraries for substantive research.

(news.ufl.edu): A six-part fall speaker series on the public's access to books and their future continues Dec. 1 with a look at the impact of Google. "Google and the Future of Books" will be presented by Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. He will examine the following questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google? How is Google's ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge? And, what danger does the Google Books scanning project pose for the legitimacy of the doctrine of fair use?

(insidehighered.com): Textbook companies have faced a number of challenges in recent years, such as open course content, an increasingly vibrant used-book marketplace, new publishers proposing alternative pricing models, and new federal rules requiring the unbundling of expensive add-ons from the traditional texts. But a case that came before the U.S. Supreme Court last week suggests that the textbook companies might soon face an even stronger threat: themselves

(libraryjournal.com): Like its peers, the University of Michigan (UM) Libraries website contains a lot of original material, including research guides, tutorials, and bibliographies. Unlike the vast majority of its peers, UM has taken the step of making it freely shareable, far beyond campus boundaries, and even for commercial use. It's part of UM's ongoing dedication to openness-perhaps not unexpected from one of the cofounders of the HathiTrust digital repository.